MEET LEARNER SUPPORT – THE HEART OF YOUR SCHOOL

We are excited to finally launch Learner Support to the SchoolWise platform: helping you to grow and nurture and inclusive school that you can be proud of. It will help you get to the heart of your data so you can truly understand the impact of your work.

A holistic view of every learner in your school

Our vision is to create a unified and inclusive educational environment where everyone has the opportunity to unlock and realise their potential. Learner support is a giant step to realising that vision while helping our schools to grow and nurture an inclusive school.

Finally, you now have a holistic view to support every learner in your school, not only those with specific challenges or difficulties. Best of all, it’s all now in one place. From the first time that a learner walks through the gates of your school to the last time they leave, you will have a complete record of all their interactions and interventions along their pathway.

To create a unified and inclusive educational environment where everyone has a chance to unlock and realise their potential

To support every learner you first need as much information as possible. In SchoolWise, capturing, storing and analysing that data is now easier than previously imagined. The result is not only producing better outcomes for learners. It also saves individuals and teams hours and in some cases, days of work.

The continuum of support

To support the needs of every learner in your school we have the continuum of support built right into SchoolWise. This model ensures that you have the framework to implement and monitor the necessary actions to support your learners.

Learner Support now lets you easily organise learners across your entire school with the continuum. You can quickly filter those in the All, Some and a Few categories. This can even be done by year group while highlighting those with an ILP (Individual Learner Plan).

Individual Learner Plans (ILP’s) that have better outcomes

Learner Support in SchoolWise helps you to identify those learners who may require interventions. But once these learners have been identified, what supports do you put in place? What resources are needed? How will you gather feedback and monitor progress? To help you manage this process the Student Support File is included in SchoolWise as an interactive framework.

Pre-built targets allow you to easily identify those that work best with individual learners or you can add your own. Targets are broken down into domains such as literacy, numeracy and managing myself. Targets are then shared with teachers through the Gradebook also allowing them to provide feedback through progress notes.

The steps within the student support file can be completed to quickly identify its stage. Updates are automatically tracked and best of all you have all the information about each learner there at your fingertips to aid in its development.

CAT4 and other assessment data when you need it all in one place

Gathering data is one thing but making it available, actionable and then measurable is another. The vast majority of Irish schools are using CAT4 assessments to identify those learners who may have specific challenges or difficulties. However, there is a wealth of information that can be obtained by delving into the heart of the data. Traditionally this requires a set of skills and training but in SchoolWise we have made this a seamless process.

The data can be imported in seconds with an actionable report available to teachers that will not bombard them with data. It also enables them to do differentiation instruction and visually display learning styles. In addition, the importing of the CAT4 data will automatically identify those who present a concern that will flag as Requires Investigation. The platform will also flag those learners who are Gifted or Talented.

The current data is then available for each learner through Learner Support providing a better context for guidance meetings, care team meetings, parent-teacher meetings, etc.

We have incorporated the storing of WRAT4 testing with more tests becoming available in the coming months such as NGRT, PTM, etc.

Easily keep track of conversations, notes and send targeted messages

Recording and tracking all the phone calls, minutes of meetings, notes, emails and conversations can be an arduous task. Collating that information or accessing it when you need it can be even more difficult.

Sticky notes, paper forms, handwritten notes, emails and other information fragmented across folders, filing cabinets and individual devices makes it impossible to get the “big picture” of a learner. Disseminating that information securely around your school can be an onerous task.

Learner Support in SchoolWise keeps all of this in one place enabling you to easily and quickly store and retrieve all types of notes or conversations. Messaging an individual learners teachers, year heads, tutors or even the learner has never been easier. Now you have access to all the information you need when you need it most.

Sending targetted messages or starting conversations with specific year groups, learners within year groups or across the entire school is easier than ever before! No more manual mailing lists, spreadsheets, toggling between different systems or trawling through emails. For example, sending a message to all first years or learners tagged as computer science in sixth year is a couple of clicks away.

It also means retrieving a list of learners for example who have been flagged with Dyslexia or have an ILP is also possible. You can combine a list of options to search across your entire school instantly saving you time.

Safeguard accountability and GDPR compliance

The raft of requirements from the department coupled with the compliance issues around GDPR thrown together with the volume of issues and paperwork landing on peoples desk every day makes meeting the needs of everyone a daunting challenge.

Capturing and storing information and data in the right context, and then ensuring only those with the correct level of permissions to fulfil their roles have access to it can be impossible if not arduous task. This creates big time sinks and high levels of stress. When the time comes to provide evidence to demonstrate that requirements are being met you need comfort in knowing that everyone is meeting their requirements.

SchoolWise will safeguard this by ensuring that everything is logged automatically including updates to learner profiles, documents, ILP’s (Individual Learner Plans), notes and conversations.

Learner Support also ensures that only those with the appropriate rights can access the information. In other cases such as CAT4, teachers only see their students data with only a distilled actionable format display. Year heads only see their students while management can get a complete overview of every learner.

Quickly identify critical teaching and learning issues

Checking journals, receiving note slips, bumping into a colleague in the corridor or aggregating the data from multiple systems (some of those paper systems) to try and identify critical teaching and learning issues can be chaotic. Time spent looking for issues when they don’t exist or more importantly, the real issues go unmissed all have a negative impact in your school whether that is the burden of time, increasing workload or outcomes for learners.

Learner Support in SchoolWise will help identify some of those issues and as we build out the reporting section, it will be even easier to flag areas of concern. This could be around CAT4 data, to attendance analysis, not turning in homework or concerns teachers come across in the classroom.

What is coming next?

We have lots more to come including reports to help you get to the heart of your data and identify issues. This will also enable comparisons of historic data to show positive and negative trends.

We are also excited to start working on a new component to our tracking system which will correlate all the CAT4 data, term results and continuous assessment to highlight where interventions are required for all learners.